II
They lay in her hand, the three sleeping forms, roan red, leaf green, moon white. Weighty stone, warm as embers, they nestled in her hand and seemed to breath a sigh of relief.
She would set them beside her mug and, much as when she was a child on her mother’s knee, tell tales with them. Snug in her deep pocket, they accompanied her to the spring for water, to the shed for milking and shearing, to the woods in search of chestnuts and tea bark and the abandoned honeycombs of last summer’s bees. They vied for her attention, slipping neatly into her palm, first one then another and she sang them the old rhymes to pass the time. Nora sang to the goats, to herself, and to the stones as the long winter passed, drifting down the mountain to the valley below.
III
Spring rushed warmly up the mountain. The stream below her hut, tired of its headlong rush and tumult down the mountainside had settled in its bed and let the goats climb up and Nora climb down to the village in the valley below. She thrust her knife in her belt – the smithy could give it a new edge – and tied a gaily patterned kerchief around her neck. In one pocket she placed three coins knotted tightly in a square of wooly worsted, in the other, the three breathing stones. She took with her Berli’s kid. Old enough now to leave her mother, Nora would sell her at market, a promising milchgoat worth her weight in spices and ironwork.
The path was carved anew each spring by the melting snow, twisting unexpectedly aside from last year’s well-known way. Now the path swept closer to a thicket Nora knew had once concealed a she-wolf’s den, and not wishing to lose Berli’s kid to her, Nora held her hand ready on the hilt of her knife.
The path slid down an embankment, crossed a snow swollen rivulet and rounded a clump of birch. There Nora found a tiny shepard boy crying quietly over a wolf slain kid. Beside him knelt his mother, consoling him with tiny pats and wordless croonings. Nora paused, cocked her head, and hummed along, a tiny husky buzzing that startled the woman upright and made her reach for the shepherd’s cudgel that had saved them, but failed the kid.
The mother rose tiredly. “He so wanted a kid of his own. A goat to raise and milk. A goat to start a herd, a tiny herd of his own. She is dead, and I cannot afford another.” The mother looked pitingly at the tiny lad as he patted the dead kid over and over again, calling it’s name softly under his breath punctuated by hiccuped sighs.
Nora nodded, remembering other kids, other wolves. Lost in thought, Nora hardly noticed Berli’s rambling kid until she butted against Nora’s skirt and nearly toppled her into the woman’s arms. Whirling about, Nora laughed, a loud and rosy sound, and gathering Berli’s kid into her arms before she could skip away, tucked her under one arm, and knelt beside the boy.
Nora gently cupped the little boy’s chin in a calloused hand, lifted his face to hers,and winking brightly at him, wiped his bloodied hands on her kerchief and placed them round the neck of Berli’s kid. The lad stared at Nora in wonder and then buried his face in the kid’s bristly coat while the kid wriggled and bleated and licked his hair into furious swirls that matched its own. Nora settled the two younglings on a bit of moss, and turning back to the woman, shooed her over to them, two of a kind, already deeply attached to one another.
Nora knelt beside the dead kid and admired it’s brindle coat. After gutting it, she deftly tied it by it’s heels in a small sapling, out of reach of marauders and out of sight of the boy, until the mother could return that evening to claim it. She washed her kerchief in the stream, hung it on a branch to dry, and with a nod to the woman, she went her way. Behind her rose the woman’s shining thanks and the child’s delighted exclamations, like birdsong on the morning air.
more to follow …
© Magdalen Jago 2008
